Case Study: Sky News achieves Guinness World Record and expanded live election coverage with Google Cloud Platform

Sky News sets Guinness world record for live video streams using Google Cloud Platform

Sky News, Europe’s leading news and entertainment broadcaster, set out to live-stream results from 150 marginal constituency counts during the 2015 UK General Election to deliver faster, more comprehensive coverage than rivals like the BBC. The team lacked the physical servers, ports, space, cooling and budget needed to receive and route that volume of incoming video for simultaneous TV broadcast and online distribution.

Sky News used Google Compute Engine to spin up a virtual farm of 150 servers—one per incoming stream—sending video to YouTube and back to the studios without extra physical infrastructure. The solution handled dozens of cellular-bonding encoders, enabled multi-platform viewing, reduced costs, and helped Sky News set a Guinness World Record for the most concurrent live streams while delivering broader, faster election coverage.

Sky News

Richard Pattison

Deputy Head of News Technology